So you have a third party code reviewer that wants your code delivered as a PDF ? Fucking why? At a guess, the code is for a highly regulated industry requiring sign-offs, and electronic-signing of official electronic records is a thing, like it might under 21CFR Part 11 , something I had to work w...

Mikemk, don't double post. How do you know who's who? There's one very obvious way (ninjaed!), but several others that an admin might easily have access to. Though if I was an admin 1 , I deliberately wouldn't list them as that'd just directly signpost the exploits that can't be detected. Better th...

Someone saw Boxcar2D and tried to make a code generator out of the same concept? I must dig out/recreate my RedCode (CoreWars) code evolver. It forcibly commented out ( added to the comments... the whole idea was to have Junk DNA analogue evolve as non-compiled repositories of once-and-maybe-future...

Here's your 360 degree rainbow: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap140930.html I have a problem with "84° diameter"... That suggests a circumference of ~264°... ;) (Techically true, in that the light-cone is a non-Euclidean surface. And few people would appreciate the spread expressed as a solid...

Is it possible to surf the rings? No, they're very sparse at people-size scale. (This is similar to the confusion about the asteroid belt - we only see it in super-zoomed-out view, so we think it's dense and things can actually hide in it, but actually the average distance between asteroids is meas...

The argument by the one time shipmate of Charles Darwin, Robert Fitzroy (who suggested that weather could be forecast, to great ridicule at the time, until he did it) was that the dinosaurs were not saved because they were too big (and most people found this perfectly agreeable and sensible). (No, I...

The decision is made to partake in an entertainment as provided for by another, on the understanding that it is an entertainment. If I am handed laser-tag equipment, similarly, even now with (potentially unsuspecting, but perfectly safe if the vendor is to be believed) real-life people. If handed a ...

Adopting the stance to Remain, as you say, leaves us with time aplenty to revise aplenty, forestalling any possible total commitment, altering the concept to one we could tolerate being within or even having another internal interogation to see if we absolutely now want to get out of the now more im...

I suppose the problem, in that case, is between greedy-matching accidentally spanning serial block-pairs (crossing tbe gap(s) between the intended regions) and lean-matching being misapplied to nested pairings (accidentally matching "open 1, close 2" interweaved with "open 2, close 1&...

This is what I would do if I could visit each planet [...] Mars: Wait until the Mars is on the opposite side of the Sun with respect to Earth and then switch the locations of two active rovers. Sounds suitably anarchic. But I think I might just plant a circle of flags around a rover, a la 'The Mart...

Let's better talk about, say, Simulation Games, and the horrible things that we have done there with our creations. In that case, I must admit that I have never deliberately killed an awkward dwarf noble, for demanding adamantine socks or whatever. I don't even like abandoning a moody dwarf to his ...

I never read "hollow of the thigh" (which I read as being Jacob's, just there) as the hollow between the thigh s ... Though there's a hollow on the outside of the thigh, when you tense your muscle, which would be a prime place to be touched by a wrestler. Difficult to tell what was really ...

So does anyone who's ever played a first-person shooter owe apologies to all the virtual people they massacred? Not the player, who generally does not choose to bring the virtual people into existance, and merely have to decide how she interacts with those that do cross her virtual gunsights. The d...

Well, mystery solved about that time I was sure I had seen a triple-rainbow, years ago. I hadn't seen primary, secondary and tertiary arcs, opposite the sun, I'd actually seen primary, quinary and secondary ones, instead. No, I didn't get a picture, sorry. (Also, having just illustrated arcs number ...

Since we've eaten of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, we can recognize a dick move when we see one, even by a deity. But we weren't supposed to eat from that tree! And that's why He put it in a different garden/behind a fence/assigned a security guard/properly vetted all His management team/...

There's Fear from the other camp too, if you're not too blind to see it.... First of many linkies: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36317915 The problem as I see it is that if it was a neutral issue (could be better one way or another, but generally equal arguments for both sides)...

On the EU exploding. You're assuming the EU is necessary for stability in Europe? By contrast, I see the EU as creating more friction and disgruntlement than there needs to be. You invoke Churchill's name there, but somehow I doubt he would have approved of integrating his country into a political ...

I suspect that if the Brexit vote comes out as Leave, then the probability of that happening would go up. The euro-skeptic movements in the other member states would look at the result, point out how Britain didn't implode, and add that fact to their arsenal of arguments about why their governments...

Balanced against the times we don't win because the rest of the EU says "fuck you Britain, we're doing / not doing this". Balanced against the times that <insert other EU country here> doesn't 'win' in a way we didn't like, because EU (including Britain) says" fuck you <ioEUch>, we'r...

I don't know, if my desk was the monitor, with some sort of smart touch input, that would be pretty handy. You'll doubtless need a coffee-holder! (Which would probably a mug or cup of some kind, as per usual - unless you usually pour it into the bowl of your hands - so it'd be a coffee-cup-holder y...

(Yes, very early. No link to the subject matter, that I can think of, unless it is also going to degrade (beyond the already obvious visual 'punning' on the issue) during the day...) Reminds me of the archive and backup 'rebacking-up' from floppies and DAT tapes onto CDRs, a couple of decades ago, a...

That's half my memories. A system I used as late as the mid '90s, I'm sure did not use /home/username but /usr/username for ~ (or, rather, ~ as alias for the path), but that system (albeit in the manner of the Ship Of Theseus) probably dated at least back to the '70s so probably was grandfathered to...

When I first read it, I thought it might even have been a commentary on The Sun (sun/bun, i.e.) just being a star. And not particularly exemplorary except for it being our sun/star. But I abandoned that idea when size h(ie|ei)rarchy was mentioned, deciding it was actually rabbits, after all (after a...

The Great Wiki agrees with ps.02, for what it's worth. I can't see that in there, actually, but it's a bit of a mishmash page, so I probably miss the reference. The 'mess' is more due to adding things whilst keeping (remnants of) old but originally logical things for backwards compatibility, I woul...

- /usr: Could be just a legend, but I hear the reason the meat of a Unix installation is split between the root and /usr filesystems is that some early-70s installation had to split the OS across two disks, the designated system disk not being large enough on its own. That makes little sense to me....

It's like someone looked at glue and thought 'how can we make this more inconvenient?". Ummm.. Not really, except for my off-hand joke about inevitably positioning the surfaces wrong, first time. Assuming you're not needing adhesion greater than that available from the decent strength of t...

Whereabouts do bread buns, fairy buns and chocolate buns come? Well, when a mummy bread/fairy/chocolate bun and a daddy bread/fairy/chocolate bun like each other very much 1,2,3 ... 1 Or two daddies or two mummies can get help. 2 Or when mummy and/or daddy got rather drunk and daddy or mummy didn't...

There you go. You ninjaed me! I just deleted my own variation... (But you may have learnt the term, like me, in that there was left-justified, centre-justified, right-justified and full-justified. Wheras those are really just left-flush, centred, right-flush and (plain old) justified... xkcd1676 no...

What sort of events do you ride such machines in? Massed-start, time-trial, track, rally-checkpoint styled ones, etc? (Although I've seen such machines in use in the UK, usually as part of the disparate throng in Critical Mass circuses, never competitively. I'm sure they're not allowed in BC road-ra...

I never understood double-sided sticky tape. I pictured it as being in a roll like standard sticky tape, but the internal sticky of one layer would be stuck to the external sticky of the next layer in so it couldn't be unrolled?!? DSST is actually two tapes. You unroll a double-layer of tape. The t...

...but if I get some freshly printed laser hair, from a print job that didn't jam, and weave it into my normal hair, I'll be able to blast things with my ponytail? Can't you do that already? I can. Although not with my head-hair, admitedly. (Also, http://www.yorkshirehairreplacementclinic.co.uk/las...